‘EU, UK, Australia have jumped on board the US Hollywood-scripted populist narrative’

The European Union is in a kind of box, and new sanctions against Russia just illustrate its policy of “the four Ds”, which is divert, deflect, deceive and deny, financial commentator Mitchell Feierstein told RT.

Today, on September 12,
a new package of theEU sanctionsagainst Russia comes into force
despite the truce in Ukraine. Brussels decided to halt services
that Russia needs to extract oil and gas in the Arctic, deep sea
and shale extraction projects. Moreover, five major Russian
state-owned banks will be banned from any long-term loans from EU
companies, as well as Russia’s three biggest energy companies and
the three largest defense entities will be restricted from
raising long-term debt on European capital markets. Russian
defense companies will be barred from debt refinancing, while
export of any technology considered military “dual-use”
will be banned for export. Brussels has also added 24 more
individuals to the list of those barred from travelling to the EU
and having their assets frozen.

RT:New sanctions against Moscow are coming
into force. Why do you think the EU decided to go ahead with
them? Are you surprised?

Mitchell Feierstein: It is a difficult position,
I think the EU is in a kind of box. They have got morose growth
throughout the European Union, so I don’t understand this. They
are implementing the policy that I call “the four Ds”,
which is divert, deflect, deceive and deny. The US came up with a
Hollywood-scripted populist narrative that the EU, the UK and
Australia have jumped on board. Who actually stands to benefit
and who stands to lose from this? We have to look at it: for
Rosneft, it stands to lose from it in the oil industry that means
they can’t finance certain deals. BP, one of the biggest
companies in the world that is held by every pension fund in the
West, which is heavily-invested there, that is hurting savers. So
basically BP stocks are going down 16 percent from July because
of these sanctions, whereas the Russian stock market dropped when
the sanctions were originally announced, has popped back up.

RT:Who was against further sanctions?

MF: Seventy-eight percent of German businesses
operating in Russia right now said that the sanctions are having
no impact. There has been a big consortium of big businesses in
Germany that have actually [criticized] Merkel on sanctions – it
was Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Siemens and 2-3 others. You also have
five countries in Europe that were on defense: Sweden, Finland,
Austria, Cyprus and Slovakia, if I’m not mistaken.

RT:Moscow says it's considering responding
with a car import ban or maybe by blocking its airspace to
European planes. How painful would that be?

MF: It’s a massive problem for those airline
companies because most of the airline companies are marginal and
their profitability has been down in the past few years because
if you have oil prices that have gone up despite what the popular
rhetoric is about oil prices and commodity prices coming down.
But oil prices are at a cyclical all-time high if you go back. In
the past 14 years they have more than doubled. So if an airline
has to fly around and it’s marginally making money right now, it
is going to put these companies out of business. I don’t think
that the EU leadership has carefully thought this out. It is also
has to do with the US dollar hegemony and the US dollar as a
reserve currency. I think that someone is going eventually to
come up and say, “Look, we are going to have an exchangeable
currency for a basket of commodities.” You see that trade
was done between China and Gazprom for 400 billion, and that’s
not dollar denominated. There is a little bit more to the story
and NATO’s military spending is going to be buffered, which is
going to improve GDP because they are changing the calculation of
the GDP in October to include military spending.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.